Mt Gox CEO Mark Karpeles Found Not Guilty of Embezzlement

Mt Gox CEO Mark Karpeles Found Not Guilty of Embezzlement

Mark Karpeles, CEO of the now-defunct bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, has been sentenced by the Tokyo District Court. The court convicted him of record tampering but found him not guilty of embezzlement. He received a suspended jail sentence of two and a half years.

The CEO of the now-defunct Mt. Gox exchange, Mark Karpeles, received a suspended jail sentence of two and a half years Friday after the Tokyo District Court found him guilty on charges of data manipulation, according to local media. Noting that the court suspended the sentence for four years, AFP-Jiji Press wrote:

The court convicted Mark Karpeles, a 33-year-old Frenchman, for falsifying computer data but acquitted him over charges of embezzling millions from client accounts.

Tokyo-based tech reporter for Bloomberg, Yuji Nakamura, translated the verdict in a series of tweets. “We’re calling it that he’s not actually going to prison,” he wrote. “In plain English: he’s guilty of record tampering, but not guilty of embezzlement. He is ‘suspended’ for 4 years, during which time if he does anything bad he’ll be jailed for 2.5 years.”

The 2014 collapse of Karpeles’ Mt. Gox exchange involved the loss of approximately 850,000 bitcoins, 200,000 of which were later found, although victims have yet to see any restitution. Despite the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee selling the recovered coins in preparation for disbursement, the recovery process has been put on hold due to a pending $16 billion lawsuit by a former business partner.